Ladybug Larva
Yesterday’s spider concludes the Halloween Spider Week. Halloween is still 3 days away, I have picked 3 really creepy insect pictures for your enjoyment this week.
Today’s picture is a ladybug larva. After the winter cold snap, Sandra Tayler called me to tell me that her side of the valley had not received snow and that they still had bugs in their yard. I grabbed my camera and came over, and we spent some time photographing insects and spiders in their yard.
I’m not really sure what the purpose of metamorphosis really is for ladybugs. The larvae are fully mobile and eat aphids just like the adults.
ZWarrior said,
October 29, 2007 @ 11:55 am
Is it the snow or the cold that is chasing off your bugs? I have found that, with the exception of one or two spiders and a moth, our bugs are playing hidey-seek with us now. But we have only the cold, no snow yet.
tceisele said,
October 29, 2007 @ 12:25 pm
I expect that the purpose of their metamorphosis is not so much to do with their feeding habits or lifestyle, as that (a) the adults benefit a lot from having wings (it helps them find mates and disperse over a much wider area), and (b) the ancestral beetles went through a complete metamorphosis to get to the winged form.
So, the lady beetles still do a complete metamorphosis in order to get their wings, even though the larvae and adults otherwise act pretty similar. Evolution is like tradition, sometimes you do things a certain way just because your ancestors did it like that, not because it’s the best way.
Reiver said,
October 30, 2007 @ 12:28 am
Never, never underestimate the value of flight to the reproductive success of an insect.
But of course, flight requires a very specific set of paremeters to succeed, whilst a ladybug larvae can still crawl whilst growing… so you have a growing phase, followed by a metamorphasis into a special-purpose flight phase, once you got all that messy growing buisness out of the road. You might be able to expand a house by nailing on new extensions, but you’d really rather build a plane purpose-built, you know?